"Laura, your useless lesbian girlfriend left the milk out again and now it's spoiled."
"Don't call me that."
"You are such a brooding lesbian stereotype, jesus. Wear a color every once in a while, okay?"
"Don't call me that."
"I didn't realize that lesbians were so common in the seventeen hundreds, wow."
Carmilla sighed. The dimwit squad – and her girlfriends, she was forced to admit – had been getting on her nerves for weeks now. They insisted on mislabeling her, and no matter how many times she told them to stop, they persisted. She wasn't a lesbian. Admittedly, there hadn't been a word for what she was until fairly recently, but still. There was one now, and she would very much like for people to start using it.
She had to give the 21st century credit. They were all about being in tune with yourself and your own identity, and as such had defined a dazzling spectrum of human sexuality the likes of which would have likely resulted in a slew of witch-burnings in Carmilla's time. It made self-identification quite rewarding, actually. Carmilla was reluctantly impressed.
She had started leaving little things around the room, dictionaries open to a specific term and, later, printouts of webpages describing demiromanticism. Her girlfriends, sadly, were not as observant as they could be, and merely went around closing books and piling the printouts on Carmilla's desk without reading them.
The twin terrors that were LaFontaine and Perry just didn't seem to care. She had expected better from them, but Perry seemed resistant to anything outside the realms of 'normal' and LaFontaine kept smirking at her whenever she tried to correct them. Carmilla suspected that the scientist was enjoying her frustration, and good god was the vampire getting frustrated.
Enough was enough. Carmilla had gathered seven dictionaries – she was refusing to think about the deal she had struck with the archivist sages in the library to get them – and a hundred and sixty-two printouts and had just spent the better part of an hour highlighting everything in them that even mentioned the word 'demiromantic'. These had been spread across the joined beds, the floor, Laura's desk, Danny's weapons rack (three had ended up impaled on various pointy objects), and Carmilla had snuck into LaFontaine and Perry's room and scattered a few there just to be obnoxious. If they couldn't get the message after this, she was giving up and resigning herself to a life with the two dimmest human beings to ever walk the earth.
The door opened suddenly, the breeze it caused ruffling a few of the printouts artfully spread across the floor. Danny and Laura, in the middle of a spirited debate about what sounded like the relative merits of spray-cheese, stopped in their tracks. "Carmilla?" Danny dragged the word out slowly. "What's going on, babe?"
Laura's face was a study in horror as she took in the room, papered in printouts on every surface. Carmilla didn't understand why she seemed so appalled – she thought she had done quite a good job with it. Who knew you could arrange 8x11 sheets into so many different obscene images in such a small space?
"What the hell, Carmilla?" Her voice was a good octave higher than it normally was as she surveyed the chaos.
Carmilla remained calm. "I had a point to make. And!" She glared pointedly at Laura, cutting off her forming interjection before it was verbalized. "And, this was the only way that I hadn't already tried." She blinked placidly up at her girlfriends from her seated position in the only unpapered spot in the entire room.
Danny sighed. "What point, Carmilla? And why, for the love of Artemis, did it require you to cover our room in paper like some kind of library blizzard?" She forlornly tried to clear a space on the bed, but gave up and sat down on top of a pile of papers, and – yeah, that was one of the dictionaries. Carmilla winced inwardly. The sages wouldn't be happy about that.
She forced her mind back to the task at hand. "You two, and that redheaded pair of menaces, have spent the entirety of our long and not entirely pleasant period of acquaintanceship mislabeling me. I have decided that this must end, and as you completely ignored every single one of my previous hints and attempts to educate you, I was forced to take drastic measures." She gestured to the room. "Obviously."
Laura gaped at her. "This is because we were mislabeling you? Carmilla, when you think someone's mislabeling you, you have a conversation with them, you don't drop vague hints and then jump straight to DEFCON one!"
Carmilla frowned. "I don't know what that means. But it's not important. Either way, you're here now and you're listening, so stop calling me a lesbian. I'm not."
Danny smiled at her. "Whatever you want, Carmilla. Are you bisexual, then? It's just that we've never seen you show any kind of interest in a guy, so we just assumed-"
Carmilla cut her off. "Are you serious, Lawrence? Do you think I did this for my health?" She picked up a handful of the printouts and let them fall again, fluttering back to the ground gently.
Danny flushed, picking one up and scanning over it. She didn't say anything, just read intently, dropping the one she held and moving onto another one after she finished it. Next to her, Laura was doing the same, but she wasn't as quiet as the redhead. "Demiromantic? I've never even heard of that."
"A lot of people haven't, cupcake. It's a fairly recent term. Basically, it means that I find people attractive, but I don't ever get what you would call crushes. I don't see people as romantic possibilities until I've gotten close to them. It's a shade of… oh, what is it. Ah, the aromanticism. Like grey-asexuality, but for romance." She looked up to find her girlfriends staring at her, eyes wide. "What?"
Laura looked around. "You did all this when you could have told us that weeks ago? I mean, I've got no problems with it, you are who you are, but this mess is going to take forever to clean up!"
Beside her Danny nodded in agreement. "I'll love you no matter how you identify, you know that, and I'll make sure to call you…" She glanced back at the printout in her hand before continuing,"-demiromantic instead of a lesbian, but this was overkill a little bit." She kicked at the papers under her feet, sending a few up in the air in strange whispery flurries.
Carmilla smiled. "It was worth it."
A shriek sounded from the hallway. "What the fuck is this shit?"
Carmilla's smile slid into a smirk.